As for your other two examples, your car can fail at any time. I don't know about the reliability of the proposed devices, but I'm not sure people blame auto makers when the car needs to be started and it won't for some reason (dead battery, whatever).

It won't be as bad as when sharks and crocs start mating. Can you imagine the horror when you get out of the water at a shark warning, only to find out that it's a crocoshark/shroc/whatever and it'll chase you inland?!

I don't know enough about stock exchange (well, essentially nothing actually), so please correct me if I'm wrong. But people would be finding a way around "inversely proportional tax". For example, a company buys stocks and holds on to them indefinitely, and the clients to that company would just negociate with the company itself who would be holding onto the stocks, with the frequency of their choosing. I've not thought this through, but RIGHT NOW (I admit I might be wrong) it seems that this way you eliminate that taxation factor.

I notice the post was labelled as "Funny", but really -- I can't imagine how much fun you have with company names such as "Google" or (even worse) "MICRO SOFT" (I suppose you'd choose to do business instead with a company called "MAJOR HARD").

Simply stop selling and sending food to New York. When people begin starving, the most resourceful will look for food in trash. When they meet competition from the pesky critters, they'll kill them and even feed on them. Finally, when the possum problem is controlled, they can send food back into New York. Next, they can finally start thinking about how to deal with the rat problem appropriately!

For us non-USA folk, could you Americans give us geographical guidance when referring to US states,

Why would they want to do that? Slashdot is hosted there, as so as the host of TFA. For what reason would they want to describe New England (or another state) in detail for non-USA folks? It makes as much sense as describing Portugal that way in Portuguese-held media.